Michael Dell Says the PC Refresh Cycle Is Coming, Really

Dell, the company, is holding its annual Dell World conference in Texas this week and that puts Michael Dell, the man, on the spot to talk about how the transformation of the company is going.

Today, he took to CNBC to talk about that as well as the state of the PC market. He reiterated a few familiar messages: Dell now derives more than half its gross margins from businesses that are new to Dell, namely software and services. And so Dell is less the PC company that everyone remembers and more a full-range IT company that “helps its customers succeed.”

Still, it sells a lot of PCs and derives about half its revenue from sales to both consumers and businesses. And now that Microsoft has gotten Windows 8 out the door, where’s the groundswell of PCs sales?

As yet, we’re still waiting. Analysts at Citi today trimmed their estimate for growth the decline PC market to 3 percent from 1 percent for 2012, the latest in a series of dour forecasts from the likes of IDC and Gartner.

So how does Dell feel about the prospects for the PC market? Excited. In fact, “quite excited”:

“With Windows 8 we are quite excited about the future of the PC. There are a billion and a half PCs out there, and we believe there’s an upgrade cycle coming.”

Here’s the video:

Update: I misread a summary of the Citi note on the PC market earlier today. It called not for any growth at all but for a bigger decline than previously expected. I’ve fixed the text above.

AllThingsD by Writer

AllThingsD.com is a Web site devoted to news, analysis and opinion on technology, the Internet and media. But it is different from other sites in this space. It is a fusion of different media styles, different topics, different formats and different sources. Read more »